Spiker was losing steadily. He did not play either
a careful or a brilliant game. Jim, playing very
conservatively, and just about holding his own, listened
to the angry bursts and the boastings of the man next
him, and drew his own conclusions as to his character.
After a couple of hours of play the Malpais man cashed
in and went back to the hotel where he was putting
up.

He slept till late, ate breakfast leisurely, and after
an hour of looking over the paper and gossiping with
the hotel clerk about the holdup he called casually
upon the deputy sheriff. Only one thing of importance
he gleaned from him. This was that the roan with
the white stockings had been picked up seven miles
from Noches the morning after the holdup.

This put a crimp in Healy’s story of having
seen Keller in the Pass on the animal. Furthermore,
it opened a new field for surmise. Brill Healy
said that he had seen the horse with a wound in its
flank. Now, how did he know it was wounded, since
Slim had not mentioned this when he had telephoned?
It followed that if he had not seen the broncho—­and
that he had seen it was a sheer physical impossibility—­he
could know of the wound only because he was already
in close touch with what had happened at Noches.

But how could he be aware of what was happening fifty
miles away? That was the sticker Jim could not
get around. His alibi was just as good as that
of the horse. Both of them rested on the assumption
that neither could cover the ground between two given
points in a given time. There was one other possible
explanation—­that Healy had been in telephonic
communication with Noches before he met Phyllis.
But this seemed to Jim very unlikely, indeed.
By his own story he had been cutting trail all afternoon
and had seen nobody until he met Phyllis.

Yeager called on the cashier, Benson, later in the
day, and had a talk with him and with the president,
Johnson. Both of these were now back at their
posts, though the latter was not attempting much work
as yet. Jim talked also with many others.
Some of them had theories, but none of them had any
new facts to advance.

The young cattleman put up at the same hotel as Spiker
and struck up a sort of intimacy with him. They
sometimes loafed together during the day, and at night
they were always to be seen side by side at the poker
table.